Kristen knew otherwise. Her mom had visited her dad every single time he’d had to go to the hospital because of police work. She was always there before he’d woken up. Always. But she wasn’t here now. Why?
“Did Drew tell them what happened?” she asked as the phone continued to ring. Each beep pushed her level of near-panic up a few notches.
“Yeah. The basics anyway.”
A little distracted, she nodded and tried to stay calm but failed. “They should be here. My mom has walked through police barricades for, like, thirty years.”
“Try your brother again in a few minutes. Maybe he’s in the bathroom.”
“No. We have a code. Two rings within a minute means an emergency. And Brian always has his phone on him—always. Plus, he thinks farting into the speaker is hilarious so even if he’s in the bathroom, he picks up.”
Her brother didn’t pick up.
She tried the house phone, also with no answer.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
“We need to go. Now.” A sense of urgency pushed her out of bed. She put her hand on the table to steady herself and her palm settled on top of the evidence bag with the dragon bullet. She closed her hand around it without thinking.
Jim certainly didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to hide his smile when she stood and felt the cool breeze flowing up her legs and back.
“Damned hospital gowns.” She growled in irritation. In that moment, she didn’t care. She wasn’t ashamed of her body and time was of the essence so she simply held her hand out. “Clothes. Now.”
“Kristen, I—” He somehow managed to close his mouth, gather her clothes, and toss them to her.
She turned her back to him, undid the tie on the hospital gown, and let it fall as she yanked her clothes on.
“Mention this to Keith, and you die. Mention this to Hernandez, and you’ll wish you were dead,” she said as she put her bra and shirt on and dragged her pants on. When she turned, she could see that might have been a mistake. He had obviously been looking at her butt but so had the nurse who’d entered the room.
“Ma’am, you should be in bed,” the woman said, obviously more accustomed to seeing partially naked people than the Wonderkid was.
“No,” she responded quickly and flashed her aura. The nurse scuttled away, clearly nervous at her patient’s ability but still determined to call a doctor. An aura couldn’t change someone’s nature, only heighten it, and a scared nurse ran for a doctor.
“Maybe you should do as they say. Your family’s fine. I can check on them if it’ll make you feel any better.”
“If they were fine, they’d answer their phones.”
Jim held his hands up in mock surrender. “Look, let me call the police on guard duty. They’ll answer for sure. It’s their damn job.”
Kristen nodded. “Okay. Okay, fine, call them.”
He complied quickly and a long, awkward moment of silence followed during which she watched his normally calm smile droop lower and lower as the phone continued to ring. Finally, he hung up.
His expression confirmed that he’d received no answer.
“We need to go. Now.” She headed to the door.
A doctor appeared—a young woman with a last name she couldn’t pronounce and a slight accent. “Ma’am, you need to lie down. Your physiology is different than a regular human’s and we need to continue to monitor—”
She simply turned her body to steel and pushed past her.
“Ma’am! Ma’am, you should stop,” The woman protested, but she didn’t make a move to stop her. She must have understood there’d be no point.
As she entered the hallway and marched toward the exit, she wished, not for the first time, that she had wings. She wasn’t entirely sure which hospital she was in and had never bothered to ask, but it didn’t matter. There was no way any of her teammates had driven her car over from the SWAT station. She would have to catch a cab or, depending on her location, simply run the whole damn way. With her powers, that wouldn’t be a problem, except she had an injured shoulder. Running miles and miles might not be the smartest thing to do right now.
“Miss, you need to check out,” an overweight receptionist tried to tell her from behind her station, but she ignored her in the same way that she ignored the shouts from farther down the hallway behind.
“Hey! Hall! Damnit, Kristen, wait for me.” Jim strode after her, a smile plastered on his face. He wouldn’t run—not while in uniform and not unless he absolutely had to. A cop running through a hospital could trigger panic. This was the level of the Wonderkid’s professionalism.
Kristen gave him a brief glance but didn’t slow. She had no intention to wait for anything and stepped out the sliding glass doors and into the chilly afternoon. It hadn’t snowed yet this year, but it would soon. She looked in all directions but there were no cabs waiting. Worse, she didn’t immediately recognize the exterior of the hospital, which meant it was definitely not one of the ones closest to her parents’ house in Dearborn.
The doors slid open behind her and her teammate exited.
“You won’t stop me, Jim. You know that. I can knock your ass over if I want to.”
He held his hands up in what she first assumed was surrender until she noticed the keys dangling from his finger. “There is no need to whack me, Miss Dragon. If you want my wheels, you got ʼem, but I’m coming too.”
After a moment, she nodded. She hoped she wouldn’t need the Wonderkid as much as she hoped her family didn’t need the Steel Dragon.
Chapter Fifty-Five
The drive to her parents’ house was painfully long. Jim didn’t have a police car, only his regular wheels, so even though he pushed the speed limit they couldn’t blow through red lights without the help of their sirens. Instead, they had to wait while jazz played quietly on the car stereo and Kristen was forced to think about what might be happening to her family. She’d tried Brian four more times and received no answer, not once. It required all her focus to stop herself from completely freaking out.
Her companion didn’t help. “So…uh, that aura thing. I felt you do it to the nurse.”
“Yeah, what about it?” she snapped.
He was a cop and was used to people snapping at him, so he didn’t react to her hostility. “Do all dragons do that?”
After a moment, she shrugged and nodded. “Basically, yeah.”
“Has Stonequest trained you how to use it?”
“No.” She sighed. “No, he hasn’t. Shadowstorm taught me about it, and he mostly focused on how to read other dragons’ auras and how to keep mine under wraps or not. That’s one of the reasons I’m worried he’s still here. He was able to control his aura really well—certainly well enough to hide from me. But, Jim, I don’t really care about this right now. Is it relevant to my family?”
“No. Not exactly. It’s only…well, when you do it, I can really feel it. You made that nurse damn nervous.”
“That was the point.”
“Sure. Yeah, I get that—”
“But?”
The light turned green and he found a gap between the two cars ahead of him and took it. Despite driving like he was in a car chase, his tone of voice was still casually professional. “Well, I could tell when you did it. I think that basically defeats the point of it.”
“The nurse didn’t think so.”
“Right, yeah, I get that. You wanted her scared and she was scared, but… Well, I don’t know. If you were a little more subtle about it, I think it would work better. People would be more willing to respond if they didn’t know they were being manipulated, you know?”
The sentiment of what he said forced a smile onto her face despite the thoughts of dread surrounding her family. “Wait, did Jim Washington, self-proclaimed hater of dragons, actually give me advice on how to be a better dragon?”
He chuckled awkwardly as he hurtled around a mail truck. They were close to her parents’ house now, less than five mi
nutes away. “Yeah, well, you’ve kind of changed my whole perspective on dragons. Obviously, they’re not all bad.”
“Oh yeah? How many of us make the cut?”
“Well, you’re okay, I guess. And Stonequest seems fine. Drew trusts him, anyway.”
“Wow. The Wonderkid has found it in his heart to trust an entire two dragons. You do realize two is the second smallest number there is? Trusting two dragons isn’t exactly magnanimous.”
“I never said I wanted to be magnanimous to dragons.” He said the word with enough sarcasm to make Hernandez proud. “Only that if we have one on our side, I’d rather she be as skilled with her abilities as possible. You might as well be as strong as you can be so you can stop the rest of those scaly, fire-breathing salamanders.”
“I’ll have you know my brother had a pet salamander.” She had meant it as a joke but mentioning her brother’s name had the effect of bringing bile up into her throat. They had to be okay. If something was wrong—if they had been hurt because of her—there would be hell to pay.
“Yeah, well, I think most dragons think of people in those terms. Pets that can be let off a leash.” There was the old Jim—the marine with a chip on his shoulder and the soldier who’d seen what dragons could really do to people in a warzone.
“And you’d still want me to learn to control my aura? You know it doesn’t really work on dragons, right? It’s an ability that we—they—use to control people. If I learned to control it better, people would suffer for it.”
“No, they wouldn’t, Kristen. Not from you. Of course, people don’t like being manipulated, but you could use it for good. If you could get a hostile to surrender without hurting hostages or get a perp to confess, well, that would help people. Think about it. This sniper is probably human. Most dragons don’t fiddle with firearms too much. Stonequest can kind of handle a gun, but not really. Dragons use people as intermediaries or as pets or whatever. If you can control that ability, you could set them free.”
“Or I could use it to get Hansen to send the whole damn force to my parent’s house instead of a couple of measly cars.”
Jim looked taken aback. He said nothing, but she saw distrust flash across his face. He couldn’t think she’d ever do something so brazen with her powers, could he? Taking control of an entire police force wouldn’t help her city but hurt it. And yet, at that moment, Kristen wanted nothing more than to bring the full force of the Motor City to her parents’ house.
The sniper—whoever he was—had targeted her. He was after the Steel Dragon. That was painfully obvious. The bullet she had pocketed was a testimony to that. And according to what she understood of dragon culture, her family would be seen as nothing more than collateral damage.
He was right, though. If something happened to her family because of her, she would use everything in her power—every trace of every dragon ability and every speck of leverage she’d earned at Detroit SWAT—to obtain vengeance and make sure that whoever was terrifying her city wouldn’t do so again.
Her teammate slowed as they reached her parent’s street.
“What are you doing?” She hissed her annoyance. He was costing them precious seconds.
“The element of surprise might be the key. We’ll drive past once and run a quick check, park a few houses down, and go from there.”
“So you do think something is wrong?”
“You’ve called your brother’s phone way too many times. It’d be stupid to act like that doesn’t mean anything.”
She nodded. At least they were on the same page.
They drove past the house. Two police cruisers were parked out front, their lights out. The outline of a person sat in the driver’s seat of each one. One of them had a red mote of light near his face—a cigarette, obviously.
“Wilson must be smoking. That’s a good thing,” Jim commented.
“Oh yeah?”
“Dead people don’t smoke.”
She nodded but had paid more attention to her parents’ house. The living room light was on, the blinds were closed, and the porch light was off. None of that was unusual, though. It was early evening, so her mom would no doubt be cooking and they often closed the blinds because the elderly couple who lived across the street regularly complained about her dad walking around without a shirt on.
Jim pulled to a stop a few houses down in front of Mrs. Ciskowski’s house. She was an old Polish woman who used to make little cabbage-wrapped dumplings for Kristen and Brian. It was strange the things that came unbidden to the brain in stressful situations.
They exited the vehicle quickly. He unholstered his gun and she turned to steel. If they were walking into a trap, at least she’d be ready to fight.
Quietly and cautiously, they walked down the sidewalk in the fading light. A chill breeze picked up. She felt it through her steel skin but it didn’t cut to her core like she knew the onset of winter could. Despite believing with almost every fiber of her being that something was wrong, she felt a sudden stab of hope that her family hadn’t answered the phone because they were crowded into the kitchen, making hot chocolate.
They approached the cop cars and Jim cleared his throat. The innocuous sound should nevertheless have drawn the attention of the cops in the cruisers.
Neither one of them moved.
She moved toward the vehicle with the man smoking. Her gaze pierced the growing gloom and she frowned. His eyes were closed and the cigarette was jammed in his mouth, still smoldering.
“Fuck, Jim! Wilson’s out cold.”
When she turned, he had his arm inside the cop cruiser, his hand at the other man’s neck. “Anders is too. He still has a pulse, thank God. Shit, Kristen. You were right.”
He snatched the car’s radio and called for backup. “We have injured officers at the Hall residence and reason to believe this is a hostage situation. Requesting immediate backup. We want Drew and Butters here if you can.”
“I read you loud and clear, Wonderkid. Have shots been fired?”
“Not yet. The officers are unconscious but otherwise appear to be uninjured. We’ll go in.”
“That’s a negative, Wonderkid. Hansen wants you to wait for backup. Repeat. Do not enter the Hall residence without backup.”
“Are you saying that you want me to let the Steel Dragon go in alone?”
Kristen had already begun to approach the door. Her ears—sharper than they’d ever been when she’d believed herself to be simply human—could hear the angry protests of the dispatcher over the radio but the complaints fell on deaf ears. Jim followed her hurriedly and they moved silently across the lawn.
“Kristen, wait,” he whispered.
“In your dreams.”
“No, look.”
She glanced behind her, frustrated by the delay, but he had taken one of the unconscious police officers’ pistols and radio. After a moment’s hesitation, she accepted them. A gun was a tool every bit as dangerous in her hands as her steel skin was. She’d be foolish to not have one.
“We take this slow, Kristen. These guys didn’t kill those officers, even though that would have probably been the easier option. There’s a good chance your family is alive and unhurt.”
“Bullshit.”
“No. Think about it like a human, not a damn dragon. They’re concerned about their image or something or they aren’t paid to kill cops. Whatever it is, leaving those officers alive is better than killing them. If you bust in there and start trying to rip people in half, you might make these assholes panic. When people panic, they do stupid shit. Now, there’s gotta be a back door or something, right? Let’s get close and see if we can see anything.”
Tense with a mixture of fear and fury, she ground her teeth and glowered at him, but he made sense. So, instead of kicking the front door off its damn hinges like she wanted to do, they would sneak around the back. It wouldn’t take more than a minute anyway, otherwise, she probably wouldn’t have agreed to it.
Kristen moved in that direction bu
t he put a hand on her shoulder. “You gonna be quiet like that?”
She understood that he was talking about her steel skin. If she tried to sneak with it, she’d undoubtedly snap branches and could even kick a chunk out of the concrete driveway if she wasn’t careful.
But she couldn’t go fully human either. If this was a trap—and she began to think it was—whoever was inside would be ready to hurt her. If she turned her steel skin off completely, she’d be in danger.
Clearly, a compromise was needed so she paused, concentrated on some of the lessons Stonequest had given her, and made her feet turn to flesh. She did the same with her hands. Changing them was simple enough but maintaining her body’s armored state was more difficult. Still, she had practiced and she managed to stabilize. Her core and head remained steel, while her hands and feet were normal.
Jim nodded and looked impressed, and they proceeded.
The small gate was closed—another good sign—and she opened it barely enough for them to squeeze through. Any more, and it would squeak.
They eased past her mom’s struggling azalea bushes, past her dad’s soot-stained barbecue grill, and up the four steps to the back door.
Despite their careful scrutiny, they still hadn’t seen a damn thing. All the window blinds were closed, and if anyone was in there, they kept their distance from the blinds.
Kristen put her ear to the door.
For a moment, she heard nothing but her dad spoke suddenly and, thank God, he sounded pissed off.
“Keep your fucking feet off the couch,” Frank Hall grouched. A wave of relief washed over her. That sounded like her dad bitching her brother out for disrespecting the rules of the house, another regular night at the Hall residence.
She leaned in and allowed herself a smile as she imagined the tableau within and waited for Brian to either say something about the couch being twenty years old or her mom to chastise Frank for swearing.
But that wasn’t what she heard.
“Please don’t hurt him. He didn’t mean to be disrespectful,” her mom said, her voice high and shrill with fear.
Steel Dragon Page 43